One of the people I admire and respect most in the technology, startup world is Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson. A little more than a year ago, I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Fred in his New York offices, just as SEOmoz was ending a failed fund raising attempt. The writer I'd come to know and love through his blog and tweets shone through - he's affable, humble, smart and considerate. And his firm employed (at that time anyway) an analyst with professional SEO experience, who also sat in on the meeting.

I strongly disagree with the statement "marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks," and I mostly disagree that it only pays to use marketing when profit margins are insanely high. As I read it, part of me wondered , "Isn't the goal of venture capital to help a company scale faster than it could without funding?"

To be fair to Fred, what he calls "marketing" is what I believe many of us in the startup/tech space would call "advertising" or "paid customer acquisition channels." Later in the post, he says:

I disagree less with this point. For some startups, "free" customer acquisition in early stages certainly makes sense as the primary channel, though I'd question whether the right amount to spend is always $0.00. That strikes me as both extreme and rarely correct. At the very least, startups should be experimenting with paid acquisition channels that look compelling - ignoring them simply because they aren't free could really hurt your growth potential.

My Perspective on Startup Marketing

I've helped a lot of startups in various stages with marketing - through SEOmoz's old consulting business, through lots of personal relationships, through our Q+A and through events and conferences. Last year, YCombinator's Paul Graham invited me down to their Silicon Valley offices for a pizza party where I talked about SEO for startups. I gave a similar talk at Seattle's Techstars a few months ago and a brand new one that I presented at Twiistup in Los Angeles just a couple weeks ago. I've embedded that presentation below:

I'm a huge believer in inbound marketing, which includes social media, content marketing (blogging, whitepapers, research, infographics, etc.), SEO, video, Q+A and comment marketing and loads of other free (or mostly free) channels. Inbound marketing is a powerful way to make consumers aware of your business and your products, and in my opinion, it's one in which people don't invest nearly enough. I'm worried that Fred's post will re-inforce a harmful stereotype that I see a lot in the tech startup world.

Product is All That Matters?

For the first few years that I was in the "web world," 1997-2001, there was a dangerous and obvious bias in startups toward sales and marketing - and branding in particular. But, in the past few years, that pendulum has swung to the equally dangerous paradigm that product is everything.

Don't get me wrong - I think a product-bias in a startup is an extremely healthy thing to have. SEOmoz's focus is ~65% product, 35% everything else, and that ratio is likely to be more product-biased in the future. But I see so many great startups who need, more than anything, to GET THE WORD OUT.

Let's look in Union Square's Ventures portfolio:

Zemanta - one of USV's companies that everyone who reads this blog should probably know about, yet I'd guess that <10% do. Certainly, Zemanta has cool product opportunities that it can and should execute, but they also seriously need to better reach the search marketing community. I've seen them doing so somewhat actively - sponsoring and speaking at events, some content marketing and outreach, case studies and networking (and that's just what I've personally observed).

Clickable - another USV-backed venture that's in the marketing space; Clickable helps advertisers manage all their account on Google, Bing, Facebook and more in one place (which is awesome). Again, I think a 70/30 product/marketing balance makes sense, but there's no way they shouldn't be using the power of inbound marketing to build awareness and bring their market to their site. No offense intended, but the Clickable blog, with its anonymous icons and erroneous Facebook integration (note that the same number of people "like" every post) could use some marketing TLC.

Etsy - back in 2009, when SEOmoz had a small consulting arm, we helped Etsy on some SEO and community outreach features. From what I've heard and seen, that effort paid off. Here's some Google Trends data (which, granted, is far from perfect):

Some of USV's companies - Twitter, Foursquare, Meetup and, to a slightly lesser extent, Stackoverflow - may indeed have product built around natural marketing. The very act of using the services creates an incentive to share, to participate and to discover. But, quite honestly, this is not the reality for most startups, especially those who are B2B focused.

In fact, there are a ton of great startups that need at least as much marketing as they do product growth. For example:

Trunk.ly - already a phenomenally useful and addictive product. My understanding is they're seeking investment to help grow/scale and, more than anything, they need a few dozen to hundred more evangelists and articles extolling their virtues. I think even Fred would agree that marketing is a "must."

Namesake - a very cool conversation and opportunity platform, Namesake is another example of a startup that could benefit from significantly more brand-awareness and participation. Whatever dirt Quora has on TechCrunch's editors - yeah, they should get some of that.

The Resumator - following several years of successful operation and growth, Resumator has a lot of customer feedback and a fairly mature product that's truly useful and powerful. Awareness among HR professionals and SMBs who struggle with the inefficiencies of hiring, however, is low. It's possible some unique product features would skyrocket Resumator to the moon, but I'd guess that marketing (both inbound and through paid channels) is one of the best investments they can make.

Markup.io - this seriously slick and useful app could certainly benefit from additional features and product maturity, but it's already solving a big pain for web workers of all stripes. More people who have this pain need to know about Markup - marketing is the answer (at least, to that problem).

I'm not a believer that a market will simply flock to a great product. Many great products have died due to obscurity; only a few great products have succeeded in spite of rejecting marketing. Fred uses the examples of Twitter and FourSquare; Google could be another reasonable example. Those are outliers, and while they might be the types of companies Fred is seeking to invest in, they're the exception, not the rule, and thus I worry that the advice and perspective will have the wrong impact.

An Update from Fred

As I was writing this post, Fred published an update he called "The Bug Report." Unfortunately, in my opinion, there's still a lot of bad advice.

Ack! Fred is, whether intentionally or not, one of the startup world's most influential marketers and that carries over to the companies he invests in as well. When Zemanta's team reached out to talk to me, they had only to mention Fred's backing to get my attention. When Fred first started writing about Disqus, using their plug-in on his site and evangelizing their value, he became one of their biggest marketing channels.

Fred Wilson is, undeniably, a powerhouse of an inbound marketer. When I saw that he was writing about marketing, I hoped to hear his perspective on the incredible channels he's built through content and social media. I wanted to know how he helped to bring legitimacy and media attention to New York as an emerging startup epicenter. I was curious about how he built a following on his blog, how he picked topics to write about, how he coached his companies to build their own inbound marketing. I was hoping for the same transparency on his clearly strategic and well-planned marketing campaigns (e.g. the startup visa) that he offers with his MBA Monday series.

And reading his posts, I felt let down. Perhaps I've just been so impressed with the rest of his written work that my standards are too high.

The final point of contention between us is Fred's view on marketing professionals:

Being not only a marketing professional, but someone who's done work to help Fred's portfolio companies with marketing, it's hard not to take personal offense. I don't know if he'd loop in the consulting efforts we provided to Etsy or the small amounts of pro bono assistance I've given to Zemanta in that group, but I know that any attack on marketing professionals of this magnitude is going to cause ripple effects.

So, instead of engaging directly, let me just point out some examples of amazing marketing professionals who've had dramatic, positive impacts on our businesses and others:

Probably no one is more famous for startup marketing than Sean Ellis, who's helped companies like Dropbox, Xobni, LogMeIn, Eventbrite and many more with early stage, inbound marketing. I've spoken to founders from several of those companies and they've raved about him.

The team at Unbounce has built a great product in a somewhat crowded space, and while their engineering differentiation is quite remarkable, it's been the efforts of Oli Gardner, Director of Inbound Marketing, who's gotten them onto the radar of the web marketing community (at least, from my perspective).

UK-based Conversion Rate Experts has showcased a lot of their incredible work, which needs little introduction here. They helped SEOmoz scale from a business that focused almost entirely on product to one that finally took some pride in its conversion funnel and ability to sell. I rave about them every chance I get.

SEOmoz's own marketing team, under the direction of Jamie Steven, has accelerated the business in a way that can't be underestimated. Yes - we've got a fantastic engineering team, we built some uniquely useful products in Linkscape, Open Site Explorer, the Web App and the mozBar, but without our marketing efforts, we'd probably be a much smaller, more niche company and the amazing efforts of our product and engineering teams could impact only a fraction of the customers we serve today.

There's many, many more examples I can and should showcase, but reflecting on it, I don't need to. I think this is a great opportunity to use the comments to showcase what you - as inbound marketers - have been able to accomplish. Let's take Fred's assertion that "marketing professionals do a lot of damage" and prove it wrong, example by example.

I can't wait to read what you've got to share, and as an added incentive, the moz team will send a nice care package to the comment (or comments) exemplifying the power of inbound marketing with the most thumbs up.

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Comments
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When I started reading Fred's post I was aghast at the thought of a company with a great product/service doing NO marketing. Surely Fred wasn't serious! As I worked my way through the post I had to laugh. All the points he recommends (Twitter, Social Hooks, Entry Points, Events, etc.) are...wait for it...marketing!

That being said, I understand Fred's frustration when he points out,

"marketing hires in our companies have had the lowest success rate of any hire and there are many so called experts who have turned out to be bad and expensive hires"

I think we can all agree developing the right marketing mix for a given product/service is challenging. If it was easy, everyone would connect with the right audience and experience wild success. Moreover, there are snake oil salesmen around every corner in our market. I can only imagine how many are chasing Fred around. Lastly, it's challenging to hire real marketing experts. Marketing just isn't a hard skill like mathematics, accounting, or computer programming and spotting real talent is tough.

Good on Seth to jump in the comments and guide the conversation by calling out the inequality between marketing and advertising.

I'm thrilled to see a civil debate between two people I greatly respect. You two agree far more than you disagree -- and I think you both recognize that.

But yes, marketing a B2B offering is very different than creating a direct-to-consumer offering that, if done right, includes a significant natural marketing component.

I spent 10+ years at B2B-focused Endeca (a leading provider of search and BI applications). In the first years, we focused almost exclusively on building great products and making customers like Wal-Mart and Nike successful. On the plus side, we developed a very strong reputation among those who knew us. On the minus side, it took us a very long time to get the recognition we felt our technology deserved. One of the things we eventually recognized was the importance of inbound marketing.

I can speaking to some of the efforts in which I participated directly in my last few years at Endeca:

In 2007, I made a friend at MIT and started an annual academic / industrial workshop on human-computer information retrieval (HCIR). It's still going (with both Microsoft and Google as partnering sponsors), and it has enhanced Endeca's visibility and credibility to technologists.

In 2008, I started a personal blog called The Noisy Channel that focused on information retrieval. It helped educate potential customers not only about Endeca, but also about the faceted search approach Endeca pioneered. In effect, it served as a no-BS sales and marketing tool. Shortly after I left Endeca, others stepped up to create an official Search Facets blog.

In 2009, I wrote a book on faceted search as part of the prestigious Morgan Claypool Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services. Of course, the book was useful for outbound marketing too (e.g., using it as a give-away in coordination with seminars by thought leaders Peter Morville and Jared Spool), but most of its success came on the inbound side.

Lessons learned?

Marketing does matter -- but only when it delivers substance. The above efforts were significant investments, and they're part of a much longer list. It would have been much easier to produce vapid press releases, white papers, and webinars. But the hard work paid off. And the total investment was a tiny part of the company's overall budget.

We probably waited too long to invest in this kind of marketing, but there are worse things than erring on the side of investing too much in product. Most of the companies that launched at the same time as Endeca found their way to the deadpool sooner or later. Endeca not only survived, but is going stronger than ever.

Marketing professionals can be very valuable, but they are not strictly necessary (every entrepreneur should know something about marketing) and they are certainly not sufficient. Ideally every leader at the company sees value in marketing, and the professionals help make the process more effective and efficient.

Conclusion?

Marketing is a lot like hiring or software quality assurance. Of course you have to do it. And it's important to have process and perhaps even specialized professionals. But it has to be tightly integrated into the organization and workflow. A stand-alone marketing department is nothing more than a money pit.

when you tweeted yesterday your disagreement with Fred Wilson, I went to read his post.

And when I was reading it, what I was thinking was that Fred - as you say in the beginning of this post - was meaning marketing as advertsiment. Somehow giving to marketing the classic meaning of one-directional tool which objective is to sell a product.

Somehow that was confirmed also by the fact that he was referring to "almost" free channel of marketing: social media especially, but also SEO (even though alerting from just depending from Google).

Following his thoughts, what I understood was: startups don't go after advertisement as a way of making you know, but use other ways to obtain recognition; what were you spend in that marketing, spend it on your product in order to make it outstanding so that people will be your "commercial force".

And, even though I was disagreeing with the his idea that marketing is just for sucking products, on general terms I was not considering what he wrote so strange or totally wrong.

But the real question (what is marketing?), IMO, was not answered. And that "no answer" can lead to misunderstandings and confusion.

In fact, what he says is not something just he says. Is something that many respectful marketers say (for instance I heard that just a couple of days ago in the National Marketing Congress here in Valencia), and can resumed is a phrase: "Bye bye Marketing".

Is now Marketing the same of Advertisement as we knew it? No. I'm sure we all agree about this. Marketing now is Communication (mostly). It was somehow communication before, but now that communication has changed from a sort of monologue to a conversation. As we (maybe inconsciously) don't want to call Marketing what we do, because we feel somehow doing something conceptually different, we start give to Marketing specifications: Online Marketing, Social Marketing, Experience Marketing, Engagement Marketing and so on... when finally what we all do is Communication.

We communicate our great products using every possible communication channel and using every possible communication language: social, SEO, content/copywriting, video, images/photo/iconographies and the still useful offline ones (conferencing, networking...).

So... if Marketing is not anymore (just) publicity, therefore to think to publicity is not the best way a startup should have to invest part of its money for. But if Marketing, as the best examples can prove, is Communication, therefore to invest in Communication is not only good, but it's also a strategic need for a startup in order to survive, grow and, finally, make the big jump.

Obviously, without Communication (aka: Marketing as it is now), no product even if it is hiper incredibly good, cannot find its success: it would stay a game for people in a garage. But, somehow, isn't this the same discussion when many SEOs says "Content is King"?

Therefore I agree with you, when you say that now is taking place a dangerous trend that sees in the Product and just in the Product the importance.

Finally, I didn't read the "bug report", so all my reflections are based on version 1.0 of Fred Wilson post, that - strangely - was not explaining exactly what's marketing for him betraying the same purpose of the article. And to not explain clear and well concept so blurried as Marketing can lead always to misunderstanding, because I think that he was not saying nothing too much different from what we say too and so different from the concept of Inbound Marketing you, and I, think it's the way marketing should be.

I love this post, Rand. As someone who loves both startups and the discipline of marketing, what you are sharing is really fascinating to me. When Fred Wilson mentioned this post and some of the things you shared, it was very encouraging to know that someone with your thinking is out there.

I am an avid reader of Fred Wilson's AVC blog. I've learned that the value of Fred's posts is not just the content in and of itself, but the discussion it sparks. To say that the three posts from this weekend sparked a lively discussion would be an understatement.

As someone who has spent a lot of time helping companies hire marketers, I was concerned by the disappointment Fred expressed in some of the marketers his portfolio companies have hired. But as I commented in response, hiring a bad marketer (or anyone else for that matter) is probably not the fault of the person hired so much as a poor hiring process/decision. I'm guessing that there was a disconnect somewhere in the expectations, the job description, the CEO's understanding/definition of marketing and/or the quality and frequency of the ongoing communication between the CEO and the marketer.

I am not excluding the possibility that the persons hired were just poor performers -- but if this happens in multiples, then there is a more systemic problem. My guess is that in most instances where the marketing professional was a disappointment, the wrong person was hired for the job that needed to get done.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about what marketing is and what it isn't, and what it can and can't do. Marketing is one of those professions in which the person in it must continually educate others about just what it is they do. Extra diligence is needed in the hiring conversations to understand what is being expected of you and whether it is realistic and reasonable. And, once hired, it is imperative that the communication lines stay wide open. In a startup situation there is already much room for ambiguity, and this is coupled with the fact that you are in a field that is part art, part science and seems a bit mysterious.

Based on Fred's posts, it looks like his real objection is to paying for advertising. He mentions using free social media sites along with other techniques to freely market yourself. If he didn't endorse marketing, he wouldn't recommend these techniques. So what exactly is Fred's definition of marketing? I'm not completely sure, but mine is this: Marketing links the public to the marketer. Whether it costs money or is free, marketing is what communicates your product to others.

Fred states in his Bug Report post that "marketing hires in our companies have had the lowest succcess rate of any hire". How is success measured here? Is it the number of sales? Visitors to a website? Revenue?

The real problem is this: Marketing is used to fulfill set goals and involves a great deal of communication. You cannot take poor experiences and generalize them into the marketing profession as a whole. How Fred feels marketing has failed him and what goals it has or hasn't met, I'm not sure. Personally, when it comes to paid advertising, I don't play around with clients' money. An investment is meant to work both ways, which means knowing what the client's goals are, problem solving, and sharing the results. It's incredibly fulfilling to see a startup company take off and know that I have been a part of their success. I know exactly how to show a client through statistical data how their money has met what they wanted to accomplish and that is why I know that paid advertising can work when done correctly.

The success of marketing as a whole can be more difficult to measure but there are always ways to show results. I don't completely disagree with a startup company doing its own marketing for free. However, the more time you spend doing your own marketing, the less time you spend focusing on other aspects of your company - such as with developing your products. You are paying for marketing one way or another - through money or time, so why not hire a professional to do it for you on a reasonable budget? Getting paid marketing to work is simply a matter of research, strategy and communication.

"I have seen 'marketing professionals' do a lot of damage to our portfolio companies over the years..."

I was doing OK until this comment. I think a little disagreement among professionals can keep people sharp, but this kind of language can potentially hurt our industry. This past year alone, over half of our new clients were start up businesses in our regional market. We just talked with one of our clients that is now getting over 100 calls a week for their service (actually, about 1 out of 6 visitors call). Granted, that's a local business, but if business owners are reading posts like this from Fred looking for start up advice, they may overlook hiring qualified SEOs who can really help get a business going.

I don't doubt for a second that SEOmoz made positive contributions to some of these start ups, so I wonder how this claim of doing a "lot of damage" is quantified. It sounds like Fred may have had a run in with a firm recently that under-produced, prompting the feeling of the need to create a blog post about it. I see this a lot after talking with people who hired someone to do SEO and didn't deliver, but that doesn't warrant an "SEO doesn't work" response.

The truth is, even the best strategies have to be properly implemented and executed to deliver results. Otherwise, you end up with no results, or (even worse) left with the damage caused by poor firms engaging in poor techniques as in the case of JC Penny or Overstock. There has been a lot of negative press going out recently concerning SEO. You just don't hear about all the good it is doing for companies when done right.

I absolutely agree this sort of absolutist language spreads negative sentiment (most likely unintentionally) widely. I actually disagreed with a number of Fred's comments, but this particular one also stood out to me. I have seen employees in every department do damage to portfolios, and it usually goes back to a bad hiring decision, or a poor match on skillset and company expectations...it should not in any way suggest that early companies not extend their efforts & resources into marketing. Oy. Anyway, I totally agree with you that this sentence in particular seemed to be more of a snappy rebuttal than a well thought out extension of his origional argument.

I think it really depends on what type of start up you are running, if you are running something like Facebook then it will get viral and you will get millions of users for free with next to no marketing as that is the way the start up works. Yet something such as SEO MOZ been in the SEO field you still have a point to prove and even though the brand name is out their that extra buzz from markething is going to push you to acquire more customers.

Sure you can sit around and wait for the viral/word of mouth buzz to kick in but to get the more natural business for SEO MOZ those guys who are online marketing managers for example who's first love may not be SEO but another area of online marketing you need to advertise to those guys directly.

What was the reason for stopping consulting for start ups and business but, to foucs 100% on software? Was the thought not their to split the business in SEO MOz tools and SEO MOZ conulting arm or is this where distilled comes into play?

I'm not sure about Facebook. Yes - lots of their marketing was built into the product, but in the early stages, choosing how and where to spread it, how to open it up, how to handle PR, press, media, advertisers, etc. all had large marketing components. Today, Alex Schultz, who runs part of Facebook's inbound marketing/SEO efforts, is one of the most talented people in the marketing world. Former Facebooker Chris Hughes is reknowned for his work on the Obama campaign's digital marketing.

These products are "great," but a fair share of the success is owed to marketing, too.

Facebook is known for great inbound marketing. Although, they never published their efforts, they silently did all they could. You can never bet that facebook grew out of college networks to what it is today without any marketing, communications etc etc.

@ Rand: Do you do any kind of consulting as SEOMOZ or its distilled only? (just curious to know)

To compare Facebook and SEOmoz is not a perfect comparison, as Facebook is a mix between B2C and B2B kind of service IMO, or so it was conceived in their strategy, while SEOmoz is more a B2B service that also aims - correct me if I am wrong Rand and Jamie - to have also an universal (B2C) value, therefore it has to follow other strategy steps.

About marketing, buzz and Facebook. It wasn't the first one in its genre to be invented: think to Classmates, which was pointing to the same target Facebook had in the beginning, or - in a pre 2000 era - Sixdegreofseparation.com, maybe one of the most complex social media enviroment I've ever know. But it was the first one using marketing and a new way of thinking to marketing as conversation that made him that hugefull success case it is.

One of the lesser known failures of Google was orkut, which died a natural death in its leading market india. Partially was due to the growth of facebook, but they did no marketing for the product. As a result, users were found craving for more.

Facebook gave them what they needed to spend more time. Apart from groups, scraps, they could do a lot more.

Hey James: While I'm not presuming to speak for Rand, I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night (sorry, couldn't resist referencing an ancient US based advert.

re:What was the reason for stopping consulting for start ups and business but, to foucs 100% on software? Was the thought not their to split the business in SEO MOz tools and SEO MOZ conulting arm or is this where distilled comes into play?

fairly certain I've read Rand saying something along these lines:

While SEOmoz was very successful as an SEO company, it was hard to scale that success. So they offloaded that portion of the biz over the pond to our DIstilled friends. Now they happily produce the world's best SEO software and as you can see in Rand'd post a few days back, it was a wise move ;)

I think its a very good move. Moving from consulting to a software company. With all the knowledge and expertise of Rand and folks at SEOMOZ, they have taken the right steps. Most startups think of conserving money (at the wrong places) and therefore, the consulting biz would have hit a ceiling pretty quickly.

Everyone would love their marketing success to look like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace at the time, Friendster, Google and the other 50-100 examples of great, viral services.

On the flipside of that coin, you've got tens of thousands of startups that may have had an equally or almost equally appealing product but never hit the viral loop/ word-of-mouth success. A lot of that depends on hard work, thinking, testing, iterations etc.

a good startup marketer needs to combine great inbound marketing skills with outbound skills and a solid, analytical mind; and the product/ technology folks at the startups need to be willing to listen and collaborate in the ultimate quest to find the right consumers.

I don't disagree with what you say at all, but I think that Fred's post still does something important: It helps people realize that they don't need to spend a bunch of crazy money on marketing. They need to just weave it into the DNA of the company. That's something not done right now by some of the examples you point out, but spending a bunch of dumb money on marketing/PR types with expensive shoes is not going to help. That's what I think Fred is getting at.

I read Wilson's post and thought to myself "I know that Rand knows and admires him, I really hope he turns up to explain why he's so wrong". And you did.

Wilson mixes up marketing and advertising, but even allowing for that confusion, he's wrong. I have very little experience of web start-ups, but agencies I've worked for have helped plenty of new brands: 3 mobile, Orange (another mobile company), 118 118 )a directory service) - I wasn't involved in any of these personally, but all of them were built on great marketing, and, often, great advertising. In a crowded market (and there are few markets that aren't crowded) getting your name out there is essential, and paid for marketing/advertising is still a great way of doing that, so long as it's not done at a cost the business can't sustain.

As some of you might have guessed based on this being my third post, this topic has really hit home with me and I've spent the weekend thinking about the many aspects of Fred's post(s) that I agree and disagree with. As Rand pointed out, however, now is our opportunity to share what we do as inbound marketers to offer support for our industry.

I work for Big Fish Games and I've learned a tremendous amount about how to build a focused, efficient, analytical in-bound marketing department during my time with the company. For those of you that aren't familiar with us, we were founded by Paul Thelen in 2002 with $10,000. In 2010 we passed $100 million in revenues. I'm the Marketing Manager attached to the Customer Acquisition Team. I SEO, I blog, I code, I design, I do whatever I have to do to help move the needle.

Before I go any further it is important to point out we are constantly evolving our marketing efforts. Are we perfect? No. Are there still lessons to be learned. Every day. Are we hyper-focused on discover > test > measure > repeat? You bet. Furthermore, I'm one of many people who are (or have been) a part of putting this marketing engine together. I don't claim to be solely responsible for any piece.

Here is a high level look at some of the ways our marketing professionals have helped make Big Fish Games what it is today:

Free Content: If you aren't familiar with our business model, it's based on the 'try/buy' system. Almost all of our games (99%) offer a free hour of game play. Not a free 'trial' version of the game...the full game downloaded to your computer for you to play free for an hour. After that, the game can be purchased for $6.99 or another game can be downloaded to try (there are thousands to choose from). There is absolutely NO commitment when you try a game. We also offer thousands of free games to play online.

Developer Relations: While this isn't technically dealt with by our marketing department, it is marketing nonetheless. Our developer relations group is responsible for crafting and nurturing the relationships not with our customers, but with the developers who provide most of the content we distribute. This is a critical component of what has made us so successful. If you look at the games we sell, you'll see a large percentage are exclusive to Big Fish Games. We're a content driven industry...I'll leave it at that.

SEO: As I'm sure you all know very well, this is a constant, never-ending battle for us. However, over the years we have poured a lot of time and effort into improving our organic rankings and as a results are at or near the top of the rankings for the vast majority of casual games available today. More general search queries have proved challenging, but we're making progress.

Blogging: We've been experimenting with blogging for a couple years and still have a way to go to really get the most out of it. However, where our blog has been very successful is in helping our customers solve problems via published game walkthroughs complete with annotated screenshots. You would be amazed how much organic traffic this content brings in. It also gives our current customers a helping hand when they get stuck on a tricky puzzle. Nice.

PR: Heard of the Big Fish Babes? Before you scratch your head and think we've lost our way, keep in mind there is a big difference between core gamers (younger, male > Halo, WoW, Half-Life) and casual gamers (older, female > Mystery Case Files, Bejeweled, Drawn). Check out their appearance on The Today Show.

Forums: Our forums have been around for a number of years now and boast the following stats: > 400,000 members, > 200,000 discussions, > 2.75 million posts. Every game we publish has a dedicated thread. Great for customer retention. Great for long tail search queries. Could be better optimized for search.

Social Media: As a gaming company, our efforts in social media were initially focused on testing the Facebook gaming waters. Recently, however, we've also become committed to social media as a bigger part of the PR mix. Interaction is accelerating...stay tuned.

Video Sharing: We've been sharing our game trailers on our YouTube channel for several years and have captured nearly 6 million views and loads of inbound traffic.

Email: We offer a number of different email marketing options for our users. I'm not too closely associated with this team, but I know it is a very valuable piece of our marketing mix from a customer retention standpoint (sorry I can't offer more info).

Thanks for the mention (The Resumator). The reality for us is recruiting is not sexy—it's one of the most challenging and time consuming tasks for a business. In smaller businesses it often gets pushed aside as "deputized hiring managers" focus on their normal tasks (office managing, coding, accounting, or even running the company). We must spend dollars or create interesting content to help drive leads.

The irony is we're using your slideshow right now (before we saw this post) to get better at inbound marketing, and we're even considering the purchase of SEOmoz tools for use internally. Looks like sharing your slideshow helped market your company!

I don't know if it's the same in the US, the the youthful nature of the digital industry in the UK means that a lot of people in it talk about 'marketing' (what they think it is) without really understanding the discpline, or how to apply, or the mediums which it employs. As a result debates much like this one can spark up based on mututal misunderstanding. There's nothing wrong with this other than the participants end up having a relatively meaningless conversation.

When people feel the need to make bold generalisations such as 'marketing is only for products which suck' and paste them all over the internet however I would expect them to do their research first. Interesting reading never the less!

Not the rest of the planet: there's a huge number of people in the marketing == advertising camp. (Heck, one of my MBA profs was in that camp. Spent the entire term insulting the marketing majors in the class).

But I would expect more knowledge and awareness from someone who (a) has startup experience, and therefore must have at least passing familiarity with all aspects of a business, and (b) is evidently quite a good marketer.

Refusing to connect to critical mainstream beachheads through the language of marketing is a recipe for falling into the chasm.

When Twitter spent $12K on SXSW that one year, that was a marketing expense.

That $12K pushed into product would have been a drop in the bucket. Without that $12K (more when you total in hotels and badges and such for the event for Twitter staff), would Twitter have connected so fast with the conference that year on product quality alone?

AMAZING article, fantastic pendulum, and bravo for pointing out the genius of Sean Ellis !!!

I'm not sure I completely understand the conflict at hand, and I'm sure there are scenarios where marketing is dangerous or unnecessary or poorly implemented, but as I understand it the general economics of marketing are pretty simple... For a market system to function there has to be a flow of information, and there's just so much stuff out there that all the information can't always flow everywhere naturally. If you come up with a better version of a product people don't just automatically know about it. Ergo, marketing....?

I think that's a pretty solid distillation of marketing. Here's to hoping that logic penetrates the into the psyche of startup founders - would hate to see awesome product fail due to lack of an audience.

Betamax was a better picture than VHS. VHS won because it had better marketing, captured more marketshare/mindshare which snowballs into more and better options to use that format and thus won the battel. Until DVD came about. Well the small ones, not the LP sized lazer discs from the early 80's (I think)

I agree to you Rand. There have been products that never got the publicity they deserved (maybe it was one of the folks like Fred who said a strict no to marketing budgets). As a result, they tried to make sell a half cooked product (due to lack of real user testing et.al.) and failed miserably.

It is obvious that you all are refering to advertising and not marketing, right?

Your product is part of your marketing mix just as much price, how you distribute your product and how you promote your product (including advertising). This is Marketing 101 and together makes up your marketing strategy.

In some market segments it can be important to focus most of your resources on product. In others it could be promotions. It really just depends what market segment you are in and who your target market is, startup or not.

For example, I'm working on a start-up that sells raw honey. Honey is a commodity and there are plenty of competitors. Raw honey is a nich within the comodity and is trending upward in interest and sales as people start to learn about the benefits of raw honey.

Now, product is actually the least of my focus. Yes, it is important but right now I am working on promotion plans that position us as a premium source for raw honey based on how we differntiate ouselves from our primary competitors; local bee farms and national brands. Promotions doesn't end with communication. How we package our proudct is equally important.

Additionally, our dsitrubtion channels are going to be a key to our success. We can't rely solely on website orders. We need to be in Whole Foods, Chamberlins and the like. Maybe even a test for a mid-grade grocery store like Publix. But, once on the shelves, packaging is key.

And, since we are positioning ourselves as premium we are going to be on the higher side of the price scale amongst our competitors but not the most expensive.

So what's the moral of the story? Marketing is essential to ANY business whether SAAS, tangable products, or services. How, where and when you make an advertising expense is entirely dependent on your marketing strategy based on the anlaysis of your competitors, customers, collaborators, your own company, and contextual environment.

And, just to clarify, SEO is a promotional tactic and is a form of advertising and is not free. You either pay a company to do it ($), you hire talent ($) or you do it yourself (time = $).

Just as there is no free lunch, there is no free advertising...even WOM.

I think that if Fred represents one of the large VC folks, then tech startups have a hard time ahead. Products with great USPs have died due to the lack of marketing. Market visibility is one of the essential components of the success of any product. I am sure that he has burned his hands with folks who had huge marketing costs and those startups failed to pick up.
I have my sympathies with him for such experiences (if he had any).
The urge to invest in self marketing tech ideas is understood, but why blast marketing in general when you know its something that a product cannot do without.
@ rand: Your response is apt and I am with you on your view.

The other thing about startup marketing is that it's like SEO is to a webpage: it can't be sprinkled on at the end, it has to be built right into the business. As Randfish says, you can't make chocolate chip cookies by putting chocolate chips on cookies.

You have to a good product that people want; you have to have a remarkable product that people will share and spread; you have to have operations prepared to manufacture and distribute that product; you have to have a supply chain that allows for profitablility at an acceptable market price.

If you don't have all that, promotion can't save you (anymore. I gather it used to be possible, but that was before my time). If you DO have all that, a promotional "marketing expert" won't be able to do much that's impressive: most of the marketing work has already been done.

I wonder how much of Fred's disdain for marketing is because he's a good marketer, and he therefore discounts the value of it?

Its a real pain to do marketing for an product that sucks, its really take a great effort & the returns are really low. So I do believe marketing works bettter with great product. A great product do get viral, but with right marketing it can really hit off hard & reach the new heights really fast.

Lets take the example of Facebook, its a great product but still even after getting viral, it penetrated Asia, Africa & South America market recently, if they have include some great marketing, then they would have captured the marketed sooner.

And for the product that sucks, marketing would work till a point & after that the whole idea of marketing for such product would cost much more then what its bring in the company.

Side note about Africa and Facebook. I think that the biggest misused "marketing" campaign of Facebook is related to the actual "Arabian Revolution", that is defined also the "Social Media Revolution" (we can or cannot agree, but it is not here the place for that).

What have we seen? Facebook did not anything in order to promote itself through a real Social intervention, especially when the Internet was closed by the authorities... Twitter, with the complicity of Google, yes.

Sometimes, marketing as a way to communicate the values of a Brand, is not just on the product but on what that product can mean as a tool, and Twitter exactly is proving its revolutionary concept in the North Africa/Middle East movements.

I think it is important to note that Fred Wilson is confused about what marketing is. He discusses creating a remarkable product, distribution, finding a niche, generating word of mouth, attending events, PR, and pricing in is post which are all part of marketing.

Nice, thoughtful piece. i interpret Fred's blog slightly differently. His piece may be artless, but its point isn't so differeint from your own (i think/hope). If you get past his provacotive opening, all the things he points to as alternatives to marketing are, in fact, marketing. Fred may not like the term marketing -- and he definitely doesn't like the budget line for marketing -- but he wants his companies to scale and he knows that to get there they have to be proactive. His list of things to do are not unlike the ones you point to as 'in-bound marketing.' He may be more opposed to the big spend mindset than to the actual activity of marketing. Today's marketing, as you well know, has lots of levers to pull way short of a super bowl ad. It's important to remember that big-time expensive advertising was one of the hallmarks of the first Internet bubble (which Fred lived through). Marketers gave themselves a bad name by taking the money and leaving a trial of tears in their wake. Fred learned his lesson perhaps too well from that experience. Still, if you peel away his more provacotive statements, his POV is not something that responsible marketers would disagree with: start with a great product, grow organically and inexpenisively by using all the inexpensive tools available -- social, content, segmentation, etc. -- to build a passionate, targeted audience. Then spend responsibly when you know it can move the bottom line. Fred doesn't invest unless he believes the company can scale. He knows that that doesn't happen by itself. Call it marketing or call it something else, Fred is advocating a start-up mentality to growth, something that any size company could benefit from.

You make a great point when you reference the irresponsible marketing practices Fred has lived through, but really, how could traditional marketers have been expected to adapt to this new landscape so quickly? It's too bad Fred still carries that opinion around because so much has changed in the past decade and so many new and exciting marketing opportunities exist.
That being said, you're dead on when you say, "then spend responsibly when you know it can move the bottom line". All too often overlooked in the need for lesser marketing groups to look busy.

Thanks for the affirmation. We all carry scars (call it learning, if you're generous) from our past professional experiences that shape our vision. In Fred's case, i think those learnings have done more to shape the way he wrote that piece than the actual substance. Ironically, the responses -- the comments on his blog as well as thoughtful bogs in rejoinder like this one -- have been far more interesting than the original piece.

My company is a start-up and as such we have a 'fluctuating' budget for SEO.We always go for the cheaper, if not more SEO rich option, and this blog now lets me feel better about our way of doing things.

I believe that Fred is missing one point about "Marketing Professionals." I do believe that certain professionals can cause damage in a startup environment but I don't believe its because of their marketing efforts. We always have to remember one thing in a startup an individuals intuition could make or break the company. For a startup to move fast decisions have to be made on the fly. Sometimes a marketers education doesn't always provide the answers. Maybe we should not be looking at the marketing part but rather the professional. Timing is everything, whether it is a blog post, a tweet, or even a video, if no one is willing to participate in a conversation at that time its a complete waste. Startup companies need people with who can make decisions on the fly and know what is the best for their company at the current time.

Great blog particularly the response to Fred about marketing and the comprehensive definition of Inbound Marketing. I am continually frustrated by my attempt to explain to 'laypeople' who are potential clients what Inbound Marketing is since most barely know about Social Media. Many of the latter do not even embrace Social Media. So the challenge is to get them to understand that this is not going away just like the automoblie did not go away and the computer did not go away. They are integral parts of our lives and no longer 'political' issues for most of us. In an effort to add some levity to my quest to help enlighten people about Inbound Marketing and its undeniable value, I have created a company mascot and named him 'Inbound Boomer'. He helps me to teach baby boomers about Inbound Marketing (but we say Social Media) to not completely scare them away.

What is our mascot doing? Why, of course, he is reading Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. How else would an old dog learn new tricks!

Great article! This article and the one by Fred Wilson highlight a large problem with "marketing." Unfortunately, many people feel the same as Wilson and only see marketing as a line item in a budget without fully comprehending the many channels that fall under it such as social media, email, and content marketing. Without marketing, how would anyone know about the product? Communication about the product needs to begin as early as possible utilizing all the low/no cost channels at hand. If we assume that Wilson means advertising, then I would agree. Advertising should wait until the early adopter market has been saturated.

I've built companies around both - I built a CMS product and sold that. It took very little "marketing" at the time; I submitted to all the CMS directories, and forums where developers hang out, and word of mouth did the rest. It wasn't a *huge* success but I sold the company for 12 times annual sales in the end..

Now I'm into ecommerce, and selling drop-shipped products. This is an *entirely* different proposition, because differentiation is much harder. Being a developer I can definately make the site "work" better much quicker and cheaper than my competitots but that's not a market differentiator per se - but it certainly helps me.

With these experiences, I agree with Fred in some ways. I have to work far harder and spend more on marketing (all types) for my ecommerce sites - and I freely admit that these products do suck more. They are after all sold by hundreds of other websites.

My CMS product needed less marketing because it was (at the time) a front-runner.

So, "marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks" - is obvoiusly harsh and extreme, but I think I understand his point..

Amazingly you didn't mention 'Dharmesh Shah' and his 'hub spot' and 'onstartups'.

"I'm worried that Fred's post will re-inforce a harmful stereotype that I see a lot in the tech startup world."

Who is Fred and Why you are publicly disagreeing with him Rand? Should i be bothered by this? I don't think so. I think seomoz readers are well aware of the ABC of marketing and its influence on sales and also smart enough not to take advices from just anybody.

"Fred Wilson is, undeniably, a powerhouse of an inbound marketer"

Yes really. The one who doesn't know the difference between 'marketing and advertising' and says "marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks".